Art Frame: MMFA 2022-2024: SEEING LOUD-Basquiat and Music

Sunday, October 16, 2022

MMFA 2022-2024: SEEING LOUD-Basquiat and Music

SEEING LOUD: Basquiat and Music

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion – Level 3

October 15, 2022 – February 19, 2023

The Museum of Fine Arts of Montreal (MMFA), in collaboration with the Musée de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris, invites visitors to immerse themselves in the visual and musical landscape of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). The exhibition offers an in-depth look at the artist’s unique connection between his life, music and in his artistic creations. This is the first exhibition ever to focus on the role of music in Basquiat’s artistic practice. The show explores his art in relation to the New York music scene of the 1970s and 80s. It introduces visitors to the sounds he conjured in his paintings – from opera to jazz to hip-hop – and to the musicians who inspired him. The exhibition brings together over a 100 works in addition to many audio clips, videos exhibited for the first time, notebooks and rare archival materials.

More than merely a soundtrack to his life, music was manifest in Basquiat’s art as sign, symbol and sound. Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music offers an insight into the artist’s complex musical universe.

An American born to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents, Jean-Michel Basquiat had a meteoric artistic career. Beginning with an exploration of the music that shaped Basquiat’s New York in the 1970s and 1980s, the exhibition turns attention to the performative aspects and the extent to which music shaped his artistic output. A music lover to his core, Jean-Michel Basquiat possessed an impressive collection of more than 3,000 records and was a performing musician himself, notably with the experimental band Gray, of which he was a founding member.

The exhibition also looks at Basquiat’s compositional techniques as they relate to music, and references his ties to particular record labels, musicians, cultures and sounds, providing a comprehensive picture of how his love of music in all its forms – opera, classical, hip-hop, jazz and especially bebop – inspired and structured his artistic practice. Musical instruments abound in his works, as do references to a range of genres.

A multidisciplinary and prolific artist, Basquiat collaborated on several videos, produced a single, and designed flyers announcing concerts in New York during one of the most creative periods in the city’s musical history. Music was not only a structuring element of his art but also a means to engage with the wider themes of the African diaspora, the US politics of race, and the history of Black musicality. Basquiat absorbed the sounds and culture that were all around him and made them part of his paintings, creating a unique artistic language resonating to this day.

“The key to deciphering Basquiat’s oeuvre and understanding its evolution lies in music. The artist always surrounded himself with sounds, and found himself at the confluence of two majormusical movements of his time – no wave and hip-hop – that resonated with his creations. Jazz was a major source of inspiration for him, as were the blues and vernacular forms of Black American music, which he integrated into his paintings and which had a profound influence on his artistic practice, both formally and hematically,“ explains Vincent Bessières, guest curator for the Musée de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris.

“Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art is loaded with sonic charge,” explains Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Chief Curator of the MMFA and curator of Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music. “Words, instruments, signs and symbols collide in compositions that sound – and sound loud – as we see them. They are distillations, reincarnations and even incantations of the phonics of the New York City streets, of hip-hop and bebop, of the Black Atlantic, Beethoven, Ravel and more. Through the music in his work, Basquiat celebrated Black artistry and tackled the complexities and cruelties of history, bringing to life the sounds that inspired him and the soul of his historical moment.”